I’ve been working on integrating PHP with Google Friend Connect and Open Social for a few days for one of my Kohana based projects. Although there are plenty of documentation around, there is no PHP example around. So i’ve hacked on my own and decided to publish it on my blog to help the others. So Open Social is a promosing platform. There are lots of containers these days and number is increasing every day. If you decided to cook your own Open Social powered platform or integrate into your existing project, please continue reading on. It should be noted that Open Social is not just gadgets and widgets for your web project. With Open Social, your project can be a container or can store persistant data and publish notices/alerts called activities. In order to utilize these, you must provide authenticatio to your users. You can just go and code it yourself. But, it was the web2.0 way. Now with web2.5, thanks to Google Friend Connect (so the OpenAuth and maybe the Facebook Friend Connect), the authentication process is also centralized now. Users already struggle with user/pass combination for most sites they’re visiting. We don’t want to add another to the list, we can just use the GFC as our authentication provider. So, if we summarize up: We want a platform based on/powered by Open Social To utilize the Open Social at maximum, we need an authentication system For authenticating, instead of cooking our own, we’ll implement the GFC which supports Open Social.[..] You can find the tutorial on http://www.regularsexpressions.com/devel/integrating-php-site-google-friend-connect-open-social/